Celebrating MLK Jr. with Discovery Education & Tagxedo

  
Because it is Black History Month, I have been trying to incorporate famous African Americans in
my technology lessons. Today's lesson with my first graders was one of my favorites! First we used Discovery Education to find the video of Martin's Big Words. During the eight minute video we paused and wrote words that were important, positive, and reflected Martin's influence on the world. Once we got our words written, I had the kids navigate to Tagxedo.com, a great website for creating word clouds in any shape you could imagine! The students could choose at least 5 words to include in their cloud. They could then put the words in the shape of a speech bubble and work with their colors, layout, etc. They looked amazing! To display their awesome work, we took headshots and glued their speech bubble to each child's picture. Our version of "Martin's Big Words-2014" are now adorning my hallway!

I created this lesson using two of my favorite tools. Discovery Education is a free website but you do have to have a subscription through your school to create your account. It is filled with tons of videos, articles, images, sound bites, teacher resources, etc. Tagxedo is also free and there is no account needed to create your word clouds. Once created, you can print or save your work and even have it turned into t-shirts, mugs, all kinds of stuff! I love mixing various tools like I did in this lesson! What are some ways that you could mix tech tools in your classroom?

Heads in the Clouds...

I LOVE word clouds. I just think they are so easy to create...just throw a bunch of words in a pile and they turn out so pretty and colorful and organized in some fashion. There are tons of sites that you can use to create word clouds like Wordle and Tagxedo, which are tons of fun and great to use with older kids. But they can get a little too advanced for my little ones, mainly my kinders. So I found a very simple, easy to use word cloud generator on ABCYa that is perfect for little typers!

ABCYa is an educational game website for students in K-5. In addition to the games in 2nd-5th grade is a fun little word cloud maker!

I decided to have my Kindergarteners create a word cloud about all they had done in Kindergarten throughout the year. We brainstormed together on the board talking about field trips, classroom events, lunches, people, etc. They then got to choose 10 words to type into their text box. Once they were finished typing they got to change their font, color, and arrangement with simple clicks of the mouse. What I really liked about this generator is that there is an edit button where they can go back and fix any mistakes they made without having to start over...unlike Wordle. This was so much fun and the kids loved their one-of-a-kind creations!